Astrophysical Virtual Observatory keeps its promises

20th January 2003

At a meeting today with members of the press
and the astronomical community the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO)
prototype software was presented. The tool is the result of the first
year of work from this European project funded by the European Union
and six partner organizations for 5 million Euros over three years.

Hot problems

The AVO prototype software addresses some of the modern
astronomers. hottest problems: How to browse huge sets of observations
with hundreds of gigabytes of data? How to get access to data and work
without having to transfer the images pixel for pixel from the data
centre to the desktop computer? How to get an overview of all existing
catalogues in the world that contains published measurements for your
favourite objects? How in few seconds to run sophisticated analysis
software on remote computers on exactly the data you want without
having to send as much as a single pixel across the Internet? How to
collect and structure the results of these advanced analyses and
present and visualize them in a simple and quick way?

The AVO metabrowser allows "smart browsing" of huge datasets, like a form of "Astro-google" browser.

A metabrowser

Despite being only the first prototype in a line of planned
releases, the AVO software features several highly innovative
solutions to the problems mentioned above - Smart browsing of huge
datasets is introduced by the software's Metabrowser, which is a
type of "Astro-Google" for astronomical observations, somewhat similar
to the Windows file manager.

The Metabrowser uses Metadata which is one of the fastest advancing
technologies within information management. Metadata is information
about data, and the Metabrowser approach enables the exchange of data
descriptions between computers, users and archive systems without
having to send entire images back and forth for characterisation and
analysis. The AVO architects participated in the invention of a common
standard format for the exchange of astronomical data named
VOTable. Over the past year this standard has been agreed upon
internationally by several Virtual Observatory projects.

Analysis of remote data

The "Astronomical Catalogue Extractor (ACE)" tool enables the
astronomer to have large datasets that conform to the Virtual
Observatory standards processed by specialised computers available
anywhere on the Internet. This methodology used is known as GRID, or
distributed computing and frees the individual astronomer from having
to move large amounts of data around or buying expensive computational
hardware.

Exploring the digital Universe with AVO's visualization prototype.

Showing the full picture

One of AVO's core components is a 'window' towards the digital
Universe featuring novel and advanced visualization capabilities. This
part of the tool makes it, among many other things, possible to
accurately align and layer multi-wavelength images on top of each
other, combine greyscale image to colour images, and it also gives
access to all published information about an object with a click of
the mouse (published papers, catalogues, observing logs etc).

New science

Today's demonstrations of the prototype tool focused on a selected
science case (although the tool can be applied to nearly any
astronomical issue), namely "The understanding of the formation of
galaxies at the earliest epochs via the study of distant, high
redshift galaxies". This was one of the science drivers set forward by
the AVO's Science Working Group (SWG) that consists of active
scientists whom themselves are going to benefit from using AVO in
their research. The AVO tool can help astronomers sift through large
datasets like the GOODS data (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey)
and enable the discovery of very red and distant objects. The GOODS
data are made up of multi-wavelength observations from the NASA/ESA
Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's VLT,
NASA's Chandra, the Very Large Array and many other of the largest
telescopes on the Earth. The GOODS dataset is well suited for a
Virtual Observatory demonstration as it a very complex dataset
covering the entire range from radio to x-ray, and because it contains
hundreds of Gigabytes of images and other data.

The AVO development does not stop here. In the coming years more
tools and methods are being developed which will be presented to the
press and the scientific community. In addition it is the intention
to give the public and schools access to the wealth of information
about the digital Universe through outreach and education
initiatives.